I bought an eBox 3350MX. Truth is that I was in a rush because I need to setup a home server. This device seems to be overcome the limitations of OpenWRT devices by featuring a Vortex86MX SoC (also known as PMX-1000) which is able to run Linux or any other UNIX like operating system.

The problem is that Linux officially - as in "official kernel" tree - does not support this architecture. There are though some DMP kernels which are released every now and then and then there's a small linux version called X-Linux developed by DMP just for testing purposes.

The website from which I bought the device, offers a couple of guides for installing GNU/Linux Ubuntu and/or Debian[1]. The installation completes with a custom DMP kernel. The problem is that there are no .path files, just two .deb files. I'm not familiar with Debian but I use on a Parallels installation (VM) on my Macbook Air - which is the only computer I have access to - and the kernel recompile is everything but straightforward. You must issue a weird series of commands to create the kernel the initrd image and so on.

I found two scripts (alien and deb2tgz) which can be used to convert .deb to .tgz and then untar them. However, I can't go on from here... I don't know which files must I edit/copy/move in order to create a gentoo custom kernel with support for the chipset and the ethernet driver.

Any comments and/or ideas where to start?

Thanks

[1] I'm currently trying to install Debian on the device using the following guide.

I'm replying in order to make some things straight for other people who might have issues with this device. The latest kernel has many options for the RDC SoC which is where vortex86MX belongs. So compile everything for RDC. The two main parts though are the CPU, which needs to be either i486 or i586 and the RDC PCI ethernet card support.

There are many reports that this device works flawlessly with Gentoo although I'm having a hard time configuring properly the ethernet card. It's like the driver does not work.